He will tweet. He will Facebook. He will be super Rahul!

Shri Rahul Gandhi is clearly getting serious about those pesky elections in 2014.

He is joining Twitter. Or some avatar of Rahul is joining Twitter.

The Hindustan Times reports that the PR firm Burston-Marsteller has been hired by the Congress "to revamp Gandhi's image" and is "likely to handle Gandhi's Twitter account and Facebook page."

Rahul is taking these pesky elections seriously: PTI

Here are the exciting upcoming attractions of the newly social leader.

"It will upload pictures of his rallies, update status messages to create interesting debates and tweet on daily developments."

But that's not all, boys and girls. More excitement is in the works. The Japanese advertising and PR agency, Dentsu India Ltd, has been hired. HT headlines it as "New PR ninjas hired to bolster Rahul Gandhi's image." Rahul's detractors will no doubt see it as Project Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtle instead. Its mission is to create a "massive" campaign to portray Rahul as a "young, vibrant leader who will deliver on the aspirations of the common Indian."

Its target is the person who once called on the aam aadmi before Kejriwal and Co. capitalized that concept and rode it to political victory. Of course, even before Kejriwal had hijacked the aam aadmi, First Son-in-Law Robert Vadra had queered the pitch by mocking the mango people of the banana republic.

This means that the good folk of Dentsu and Burston-Marsteller have their work cut out for them.

However luckily for them, there is no shortage of advice. Everyone has an opinion on Project Rahul. Unfortunately the opinions often flatly contradict each other, reflecting the disarray the Congress finds itself in.

MJ Akbar, for example, writes in The Times of India that Rahul's problem is that "a knight in shining armour is better suited for the frontlines of the opposition" rather than the standard-bearer of a party completing two terms in office. As Rahul "flits from cause to cause" he does his own cause no good. He'd do better if he paid attention to mommy's route to power – "maximization of electoral spread through regional alliances, and largesse from the national kitty to, in the name of distributive justice to targeted demographic clusters."

Akbar writes while Sonia's handouts have come in for heavy criticism, at least "there was no contradiction in her strategy." Rahul, on the other hand, in his eagerness to play "blue-blood warrior against sleaze" is making it a habit to contradict not the BJP, but his own party.

But India Today's S. Prasannarajan thinks that to "win the future, he has to emulate not his mother but his grandmother." He writes that Rahul, the "porcelain princeling of Indian politics" has to show ruthless cunning in order to "dismantle the entrenched old order the way Indira Gandhi outwitted the Syndicate to begin her journey as Mother India." Sonia, he writes, had neither the "idea or the urgency to arrest the Manmohan Singh malady" and has let the grand old party "wither away in her shadow".

Meanwhile Rahul himself seems to be looking at other role models. As Chanakya points out in the Hindustan Times "(n)o less than Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi spoke of how the party needed to emulate AAP in connecting with the people." Past glories and stories of martyrdom do not cut it anymore. Netas, writes Chanakya, will need to "eat a bit of humble pie" and they will have to learn to speak "to the people, not at people."

One wishes Rahul all the best if he attempts to do all this and more in 140 characters or less as he wades into social media holding Burston-Marsteller's hands with the national elections looming in front of him. Project Rahul is a great favourite for all our pundits because the man has become our national Rorschach test – a political inkblot that can be interpreted freely as anything one chooses.

The project now has the eerie feel of many government projects which are announced with great fanfare but seem to take forever with no end in sight. Every milestone, be they Assembly elections in UP or Rajasthan, is just brushed aside when met with failure. Meanwhile expenses keep mounting. HT reports the Dentsu advertising contract with the Congress is to the tune of Rs 500 crore.

But that's not the only cost being borne by the Congress. The biggest problem facing the grand old party is not about the reforms Rahul wants to initiate to make it a more modern meritocratic transparent party. As Hartosh Singh Bal writes in Caravan:

Although it is difficult to envisage what the party's new structure might be, it doesn't really matter. In the recent assembly elections, Rahul, who was in charge of ticket distribution and was the face of the campaign, showed that he is no vote-getter; he cannot even hold an audience at a rally. Without being able to deliver on this count, all his attempts at reforming the Congress are meaningless.

Meanwhile the highly-paid consultants at the PR firms can hold roundtable meetings, surveys and focus groups to decide really important questions about our future. For example, which face should the newly revamped Rahul Gandhi project to the public – clean-shaven or stubbled?